Astral Codex Ten

Ethereum

7 min read

Ethereum

Article

Ethereum is a recurring brand in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between February 08, 2021 and February 20, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “USDCoins, a stablecoin related to Ethereum”; “Ethereum prediction market Augur”; “your choices are Paypal, Bitcoin, Ethereum, check in the mail”. It most often appears alongside Bitcoin, Trump, US.

Metadata

  • Category: Brands
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: February 08, 2021
  • Last seen: February 20, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

21
February 08, 2021 · Original source
Probably it's the second one. I tried to bet against Trump, but getting money into the market was pretty hard. You need USDCoins, a stablecoin related to Ethereum. Polymarket tries to let you buy them directly, but their app wanted me to give them a security code which never showed up, so I gave up on this. Instead I bought some USDC at Coinbase and tried to send them over. But along with the usual Ethereum gas fees, they have something called a relayer, which is supposed to collect my money and put it in my account. And it's apparently heavily backed up, and after two days my money is nowhere to be seen (though I believe them when they say that they're trying their hardest and it will probably percolate through the Ethereum network someday). Maybe everyone's having these kinds of issues and this is why the Trump contract hasn't adjusted? I'm not sure. I will keep you updated if my money ever materializes.
Inline links: when they say
Mantic Monday: Judging April COVID Predictions
February 23, 2021 · Original source
2: Vitalik Buterin talks about his adventures winning $50,000 betting against Trump on Ethereum prediction market Augur. It took a pretty complicated chain of crypto contracts to make it work, and I look forward to the time when people will be able to use this technology fluidly without having to literally be Vitalik Buterin. He concludes (like many people) that prediction markets were kind of dumb this past election but there are reasons to think they can get smarter fast:
Inline links: talks about his adventures
I expect prediction markets to become an increasingly important Ethereum application in the years to come. The 2020 election was only the beginning; I expect more interest in prediction markets going forward, not just for elections but for conditional predictions, decision-making and other applications as well. The amazing promises of what prediction markets could bring if they work mathematically optimally will, of course, continue to collide with the limits of human reality, and hopefully, over time, we will get a much clearer view of exactly where this new social technology can provide the most value.
Book Review Contest 2022 Winners
September 02, 2022 · Original source
=3rd: The Internationalists, reviewed by Belos. Belos is working on a new blook titled best of a great lot about system design for effective governance. All three third place winners were within two votes of the others, so I decided to award a joint prize. First place gets $5,000, second place $2,500, all three third places get $1,000 each. Please email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com to tell me how to send you money; your choices are Paypal, Bitcoin, Ethereum, check in the mail, or donation to your favorite charity. Please contact me by October 1 or you lose your prize. The other Finalists were: Consciousness And The Brain, reviewed by Demost. Demost is a university researcher in mathematics, computer science, and neuroscience.
Inline links: The Internationalists, best of a great lot, Consciousness And The Brain
Why I'm Less Than Infinitely Hostile To Cryptocurrency
December 08, 2022 · Original source
I’m not focusing on investment returns in order to claim that crypto is a good investment (it was a good investment ten years ago, but you already knew that). I’m focusing on this because if most crypto projects were scams and Ponzis, you would expect people who invested in them to do poorly, whereas in fact the opposite is true. Some of this is that a few cryptos did very well (eg Ethereum) and drowned out the rest doing badly. But even in 2020 when Ethereum’s gains were mostly played out, on average you would have done fine.
Conflict of interest notice / I am dumb alert: I do hold some cryptocurrency, mostly Ethereum, mostly because I received it a while ago as crypto, and want to wait until the end of the bear market before selling it.
Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023
February 20, 2023 · Original source
Cryptocurrency will neither collapse nor take over everything. It will become integrated into the existing system and regulated to the point of uselessness. No matter how private and untraceable the next generation of cryptocurrencies are, people will buy and exchange them through big corporate websites that do everything they can to stay on the government’s good side. Multinationals will occasionally debate using crypto to transfer their profits from one place to another, then decide that would make people angry and decide not to. There may be rare crypto-related accounting tricks approximately of the same magnitude as the “headquarter your company in the Cayman Islands” trick. A few cryptocurrencies might achieve the same sort of role PayPal has today, only slightly cooler. Things like Ethereum prediction markets might actually work, again mostly by being too niche for the government to care very much. A few die-hards will use pure crypto to buy drugs over the black market, but not significantly more than do so today, and the government will mostly leave them alone as too boring to crush.
ECONOMICS: IDK, stocks went down a lot because of inflation, inflation seems solveable, it'll get solved, interest rates will go down, stocks will go up again? In terms of crypto, I'll repeat what I said on my last crypto post: people have found some good applications for stablecoins, especially in foreign countries and for niche transfers by large actors. I expect that to continue, maybe expand, and in that sense I'm bullish, but all of this will get regulated to the point of total boringness. Ethereum will do fine because stablecoins are built on its chain, Bitcoin will do find because Bitcoin maximalists are like cockroaches and even a nuclear war couldn't kill them, altcoins will mostly not do fine. There will still be some exciting applications for solving coordination problems and protecting privacy, but they will be limited to the same niche groups of cypherpunks who cared about these things before cryptocurrency, and mostly not change the world. An exceptionally good result within this window would look like the same kind of niche that Signal has for communication.